This seminar will introduce you and your leadership team to two power planning methodologies:
Strategic Planning: Create an operational planning document to guide company leaders and employees, and improve the executive teams ability to identify, prioritise, assign opportunities, and contribute to your company's improved performance. Leadership team members select high impact alternatives while building support necessary for successful implementation.
Scenario Planning: This "thinking around the corner" meeting helps teams consider alternative futures and prepare a successful response plan no matter the situation. The value of this technique comes from the deep dialogue provoked by different scenarios. The alternate views will help generate new insights about a company and its possible futures. Thinking this way helps prepare contributors to notice and consider emerging ideas before others even perceive any change.
Scenario Planning is an excellent complement and second step to effective Strategic Planning.This may even be the first time these two powerful planning methodologies have been presented in the same seminar.
Course Benefits
-
Prepare you and your leadership team to see and act on the future - near term (strategic planning) and long term (scenario planning). Make better decisions
-
Build better support for decisions to assure successful implementation
-
Build teams ability to handle conflict and change
-
Accelerate company improvement and innovation initiatives
-
Turn good thinking into a significant competitive advantage
Target Audience
-
Executive Leaders and their teams
-
Divisional Managers and their teams
-
Project Managers and their teams
-
Supervisors and their teams
-
Anyone who wants to improve their organisations results by developing effective thinking strategies to drive an organisations improvement and innovation initiatives
Course Outline
Day 1 - Strategic Planning
-
Mission: "who we are, what we do"; ultimate intent of organisation; no time constraint. ·
-
Principles or Values: "how we work together"; rules about how we treat ourselves, each other, and our community. ·
-
Vision: "where we want to be"; a long view, 3-5 years, of what must be accomplished to support the Purpose. ·
-
Scoreboard: "success as measured by..."; tactical or strategic; measurable performance expectations. ·
-
Business Environment: "playing field; even and uneven"; listing of internal and external promoting and restraining forces. Can include detail market analysis. ·
-
Goals: "what to do next"; specific milestones of what must be accomplished in the next year to support the Vision. Usually three to five are useful. ·
-
Strategies: "how to" accomplish Objectives while considering business environment requirements. Usually three to five per Objective are useful. ·
-
Action Plans: "to do assignments"; quarterly, prioritised action steps necessary to support the Objectives and Strategies. Usually three to five per Strategy are useful. ·
-
Plan Implementation Considerations: budget plan, barriers, proliferation plans, and organisation communication plan, ·
-
Plan Monitoring Considerations: criteria and plan to monitor your progress
Day 2 - Scenario Planning
-
Introduction: Seminar overview. goals, introductions, assumptions, ground rules.
-
Scenario Planning Introduction: Review purpose and strategy of deliberately creating new ideas.
-
Select topics which need new ideas: plan to use techniques on practical issues.
-
Introduce Process Steps: Learn steps to creative effective scenarios
-
Practice with the techniques: Practice with many of the above techniques on your selected issue; small groups working on same or variety of issues.
-
Using techniques in your workplace: How techniques can be used effectively in a wide variety of business environments; review facilitator fundamentals.
-
Next Steps: Plan for your successful implementation of this new thinking.
Process Considerations
These planning approaches are directed at improving business performance. Improved performance is the result of better decisions, and behaviours associated with the day-to-day communications used in conducting business. Improved decisions and behaviors, on the other hand, are the result of improved ideas and insights. And improved ideas and insights are the result of how we think. Thinking is an improvable skill. Intelligence is our innate thinking capability, and how we think is how we use this capability.
Planning sessions with senior teams are crucial to a companys success. Effective planning sessions improve the way senior teams think. When facilitated well, a team can come up with preferred alternatives (using specific techniques that provoke new ideas) while building support for the decisions (using specific techniques which promote dialogue). The results of these meetings – great decisions with support to confirm successful implementation – will direct the rest of the organisation towards the future.
Available Course Sessions
Please click here to stay updated on upcoming sessions.
Trainer Profile
John Canfield
Independent management consultant, John Canfield helps company leaders and employees solve difficult problems, create new products and services, and improve business performance. He most often supports companies in the areas of continuous improvement, creativity and innovation, and strategic planning.
His primary mode of help is to design and facilitate business meetings, seminars and one-on-one coaching sessions using a wide variety of thinking styles (strategic planning, scenario planning, flow charts, creative thinking methods, etc) to generate new ideas and strategies.
Prior to 1990 Mr Canfield was a Senior Engineering Manager for Intel Corporation and later Director of Corporate Quality and Design Research for Herman Miller.
